A Mission-Based Multiagent System for Internet Applications

Software agents have been one of the most active research areas in the last decade. As a result, new agent technologies and concepts are emerging. Mobile agent technology has been used in real life environments, such as on-line auctions, supply chain, information gatherings, etc. In most situations, mobile agents must be created and carefully crafted to work together almost from scratch. We believe that this is quite inefficient for application developers and users, and hence propose a system for generating and coordinating agents based on the notion of agent missions. The prototype system is called eHermes and its architecture and components are discussed in the paper.